


kept at bay

by Anonymous



Category: Vinland Saga (Manga)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Estrangement, Gen, Period Typical Attitudes, Vinland Saga Manga Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:21:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22036216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Fifteen years after the war at Ketil's Farm, Thorgil is carried home with injuries too severe to ever fight again. Olmar experiments with rehabilitation, but encounters resistance.
Relationships: Olmar & Thorgil (Vinland Saga)
Kudos: 3
Collections: Anonymous





	kept at bay

**Author's Note:**

> This one turned out platonic, but obviously I'm the same person who wrote the other shippy stuff of them, so please hit that back button if you don't want to experience content from someone who's also written incest noncon! ✌️
> 
> As always, even if I can also appreciate the canon relationships for what they are, I'm @ vincestsaga on twitter for more brocontent
> 
>  **Further warnings:** Character preferring death to being severely physically disabled, due to his personality and the culture/time period.

"Let me out of here," Thorgil says, from the bed. "Give me a peg leg, or something."

"No," says Olmar, from the doorway. He's enough trouble as it is. Everything he could grab has been cleared away now, leaving a room oddly bare in a wide circle around the head of the bed. The rest of it is nicely furnished, though.

"Fight me, then. Give me a sword. Anything."

"I'm not going to fight you," Olmar says. "You're family."

Thorgil blows out a short, disgusted breath. "Nice word. I used to think it mattered. I'm fucked, then, huh? Till the end of days."

It doesn't matter, anyway, no matter what Thorgil thinks. They saved most of the left leg, but the right one's gone halfway above the knee. If it were just the left he'd be able to hobble around, with a good enough peg made of wood or horn. No doctor's getting him back up on the right, though. He'll need a special chair like Grandpa used to have. If he can ever be trusted out of bed again.

He was still in and out of consciousness when they brought him to the farm. Most of the right arm missing, too, although he could have managed with that. More scars on his face; old ones, though. Something finally caught up with him and left more than a few cuts. The friend who brought him couldn't say who or what it was, exactly. Not a close friend, just one who knew him back when he used to speak of his family, and remembered it was a rich one. Olmar paid the friend for the trouble as well the doctor he'd brought along on credit, and he saw them off, and he had his brother carried in from the docks.

"You know what _family_ is, little brother? The people who can disappoint you the most. That's all."

"I guess that's true." Olmar turns away, and they don't talk again that day.

None of the workers around these days had ever met Thorgil, so Olmar warned them to keep at least three men in the room whenever anyone was in with him. They figured out pretty quickly he wasn't just being a worshipful little brother. One arm and most of a leg are enough to make him everybody's least favorite job.

"You don't have to be so difficult," Olmar says. "They're here to help you."

"They still eat our food?"

"Yeah, of course."

"Let 'em earn it, then," Thorgil says.

Olmar doesn't ask what happened, or how the friend who brought him home came across him. He thinks Thorgil must have been unconscious, because the friend isn't one of the names he curses. Not for the pain, but for everything else.

He goes out in a chair some days, once he's too sick of looking at the room to raise a fuss about being carried anywhere else. Even outside he can't be left near anything he might pick up and use as a weapon. Olmar sits with him and eventually Thorgil gets tired of telling him to fuck off, and there's quiet for a while.

"You're lucky Dad built all this," Olmar says. "Most men who get injured this bad don't have families with the money to care for them."

"You're the lucky one. Living like a king, with your very own prisoner in the dungeon."

"I'm not going to let anyone else die because of me." Least of all his own brother. Even with everything that's happened.

Thorgil holds his eyes for a long time. "You never," he says at last, "understood one thing about the world, did you?"

"Your world, maybe." Olmar doesn't break his gaze. "But you're in my world now. They don't call this Ketil's Farm anymore, you know."

"I'd rather be fucking dead." Thorgil says it flat and even, with no trace of bitterness or anger. Nothing that might let Olmar think he's exaggerating.

It doesn't keep him from eating. Dying in bed must be a prospect even more horrifying than living without hope. Or maybe his body just doesn't understand the concept of giving up. His muscles start to wither anyway, what's left of them, and he grows smaller than Olmar ever expected to see his big brother. Nobody wants to come near him with anything sharp, even when he's sleeping, and his hair gets longer and longer.

There's a steady stream of doctors and even midwives, at first, when Olmar puts out the word, but eventually he realizes he's too scared to try anything they tell him. There's no way to figure out who's bullshitting for the fee he promised. This level of injury must be a rare one even in bigger towns where you might see a duel or something. The most they've probably dealt with is bedridden old folks who just need to be turned over now and then. Exercise and mental stimulation are the only things he hears that make any sense, and even Olmar could have guessed that. Nothing's going to grow back the limbs his brother lost, and they're not as rich as they used to be in Dad's day.

"Can't you try to enjoy something?" Olmar says. "You can have anything you want. I'll find someone who can read, or knows stories. A musician, if you want one."

"How many damn people do you need to show me off to?" He'd look a little like Dad used to, when they were really young, if it weren't for all the scars. "Bring me a sword and a man carrying his own, or get out."

Thorgil sits so still out on the porch some days that birds start to gather around them, and when one finally grows brave enough to search for food almost within arm's length, Olmar watches Thorgil watching it. It doesn't come back the next time they're out, but the time after that ventures even closer, and again Olmar watches his brother, so closely that when he registers the slight motion of his left arm starting to grab, he reaches for the bird in almost the same moment. Olmar is the one in its range of vision, and his sudden movement is enough to startle it, Thorgil's fingers just knocking it aside as it takes flight. For a second Olmar thinks it's stunned, but it rights itself and flies off, the rest of its friends joining it.

Thorgil doesn't speak. And Olmar doesn't know what he was expecting. For his brother to let birds perch on him as the sun sets, embracing a peaceful life he never wanted even as a child? He doesn't sit with Thorgil much after that, because the only sound behind the quiet is Thorgil wondering if he should have grabbed him by the hand, in that one second they were close enough. He tries to work where his brother can see him, at least, until Thorgil finally breaks the silence to tell him if he has to watch Olmar turn that fucking plow around one more time, he's going to lean off the chair and the porch and break his own neck.

Something gives inside after he fails at catching the bird. His appetite goes, and the workers complain less to each other about being on Master's-brother duty, and he dies in bed after all, a year after being brought home.

"What would you have done if I'd gone into battle with you?" Olmar says before it happens, still from the doorway. "Would you have looked out for me?"

"Of course." His voice is stronger than it should be, rumbling from his chest with only the barest hint of how his body has wasted down to almost nothing. "If you pulled your own weight."

"How about now?" Olmar looks down at his brother, in what must be the last days of his life, here on the farm where he was born. He wants to look away, but knows he won't get another chance to see him. "Do you really hate me that much?"

"Come a little closer," Thorgil says, still from the bed, "and we'll both find out."

Olmar doesn't have the nerve to do it. He never has, in this whole year. He's stayed in the doorway, and he's stayed a few feet away on the porch, and he's never been within arm's reach of his brother, except for that one instant. He only asked out loud because he knows that Thorgil can't answer him.

He's so far gone now that he probably isn't dangerous anymore. But Olmar doesn't want to know. The hurt would be in seeing his brother's arm start to move, not anything that came after.

You can't grow a field where the earth doesn't want one, he tells himself when he looks at the grave marker. A big one, by Dad's and Mom's and Grandpa's. And his own, someday. Probably the last place his brother ever wanted to be buried. He thinks it would be nice if birds came to sit on the stone, but they don't.

Maybe Thorgil really loved him when he was born, just in the first instant he saw him. Olmar wishes he could remember that moment. Because it seems they get to live in the same world once every twenty years or so, even if it's only for a fraction of a second.


End file.
